2.2 Evaluating opposing interpretations: John Röhl and Christopher Clark

Could you talk a little bit about what sort of evidence there is to make that point – for example in December 1912, the infamous war council about which you in particular have written a lot, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about why this is an important event.

The war council was a wonderful, exciting discovery back in the 1960s which I picked up because the original document recording it was actually published in a slightly adulterated form and I went back to the original diary entry of one of the people present, an Admiral, and said, hang on, what he actually says is this and not what was published. Again, coming back to the point which I think is so important, that we have to go back to the original documents and not rely on what was printed, by people who were perhaps falsifying the documents for patriotic reasons. And essentially what that document and five others that we’ve discovered meantime were describing was a meeting called by the Kaiser on a Sunday morning, 8th December 1912. It was a meeting of him and three or four of his generals and three or four of his admirals. And the important point there is that the Reich-Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg was not invited, the foreign secretary was not invited and what they were doing, they were discussing whether to have an immediate war or whether to postpone the war for another, they said, year and a half, 18 months, until certain things had been put in place. The interesting thing is that when these documents were first discovered and discussed there was great interest, and then interest waned, didn’t it. We’ve had a period of about 25 years now where I virtually alone have been saying, look, this is important, you can’t just ignore it. Let’s try and work out what it’s about. Then many years later, after Hitler was defeated and Germany was divided, a completely new discovery, something that nobody anticipated, which was the discovery of Germany’s war aims, of the extent of Germany’s war aims during the First World War and, in particular, one document which was Bethmann Hollweg, Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s September Programme of 9th September 1914 outlining what Germany was going to demand in the expected victory over France, expected just in a day or two maybe. Now unfortunately for Bethmann Hollweg, that very day in which he signed this document and sent it off was the day the Battle of the Marne began, which of course stopped the German advance into France in its tracks, and so Bethmann never actually got to the point where he could impose these terms on a hapless France. But from the document, which is long, which has a preamble, which is four weeks in the making, we have notes in his handwriting, Bethmann Hollweg’s handwriting, going back to the 16th of August 1914, where verbatim some of these demands are formulated. He says very clearly the general aim of this war for Germany is to secure the safety, the power of Germany, in west and east, for all imaginable time. And then he goes on to spell out the details of how Belgium is going to be divided up including the acquisition of a so-called Mittelafrika, a central African empire stretching from the east coast to the west coast and including the whole of the Congo. Now that is a massive blueprint for the domination of Europe and beyond. And this is early in the war, it is written not by some crazy pan-German, not by some general who’s lost his marbles, but by decent, philosophical, civilian Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg who sends it quite officially to his deputy in Berlin. And ever since we’ve had that document, all sorts of arguments were advanced to try to demean it in some way – oh it’s just a shopping list, he’s just doodling because as a chancellor there’s nothing he can do in war time anyway – that was how it was denigrated. But just as there’s no way back behind the Kautsky documents of 1919, so there’s no way back, in my view, behind the Bethmann Hollweg September Programme and all the other things that Fritz Fischer and others have been able to discover.